ABSTRACT
The recognition plot gives retrospective shape to a life, often to several lives in their connectedness. The shape may be social, moral, spiritual, psychological, or some combination of these, but it always embodies knowledge, an attempt to make cognitive sense of human agency in the face of the contingent world. In the early modern period, the pressures exerted on such plots by rapidly changing epistemological and cognitive frames of reference are discernible in the emergence of new modalities of recognition and the mutation of older ones. George Eliot's interest in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and in the Bildungsroman, which she shared with George Henry Lewes, is well established. The essential point is that George Eliot appears to rewrite the rescue in such a way as to negate certain aspects of the Goethean model. The relation of music to memory and to originary experience is a key component of this circuitry.
